PC Mag: AT&T has the fastest LTE download speeds in Houston

In May, PC Mag dispatched testers to 30 different U.S. cities to test wireless network speeds. This has become an annual ritual for the publication, which has surveyed the cellular data landscape for three years in a row.

The magazine looked at both 3G and 4G networks, though clearly the latter was the focus, as it’s where the market is headed. Writer Sascha Segan says there’s no clarity this year on what constitutes “real” 4G:

We found the situation is even muddier than it was last year, as all the carriers seems to be calling nearly everything 4G. We’d love to say that LTE is the gold standard, but that isn’t always the case, as the slower results from MetroPCS’s LTE network and the speedy downloads on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 42 network show. (For more about 4G classification and speeds, see How Fast Is 4G?)

Rather, you need to have a solid LTE network with lots of spectrum to win, and it helps if not a lot of people are using it yet. Across our 30 cities, Verizon’s 4G LTE network dueled with AT&T’s new 4G LTE network for supremacy; Verizon won 19 cities while AT&T won 10, and the two carriers tied in one. T-Mobile came surprisingly close for a non-LTE carrier. And the slower results in cities where AT&T and T-Mobile have less spectrum show that the spectrum crunch is real. (For more, see Why Spectrum Matters.)

Houston was not included in the 2011 survey, butit was this year. The results mirror what I’ve seen in my own tests: That AT&T’s shiny new LTE network generally outruns Verizon’s more established one, and delivers jaw-dropping peak download speeds. At the Pinemont Shopping Center at Ella and Pinemont on the northwest side, PC Mag’s tester registered a zippy 52.75 Mbps down on AT&T’s LTE network, and average downloads of 17.57 Mbps. That was one of the fastest results PC Mag found nationwide.

Although it wasn’t in Houston, PC Mag also got a chance to try out Sprint’s as-yet-unlaunched LTE network in Atlanta. While it’s basically an unused network at the moment, PC Mag found speeds comparable to the competition, though they varied based on the test software being used:

Using the Sensorly software at four of our locations, we got average download speeds between 9 and 13Mbps, which is similar to the speeds in AT&T’s two faster 5MHz channel cities but slower than you see in its 10MHz channel cities. Sprint’s peak download speeds hit 26.5Mbps down, which is as much bandwidth as anyone really needs. That’s also similar to AT&T’s peak speed in a solid 5Mhz city like Raleigh, where we got a 27.8Mbps peak on AT&T.

Sprint’s download speeds were comparable to speeds on Verizon, which uses 10MHz channels, but Verizon also has many more people using its LTE network.

Uploads were on the slow side, but here’s where the test method really becomes an issue. Using our Sensorly test we saw upload speeds averaging 2.19Mbps, once again comparable to AT&T’s 5MHz cities and faster than T-Mobile’s HSPA+ or Sprint’s old WiMAX 4G, but slower than Verizon. The network hit 2.97Mbps for peak uploads.

But I’m pretty sure both Sprint and AT&T are tuning their networks to respond better to multiple simultaneous upload streams, because when Ookla tested four streams at once, we saw 7.4Mbps up on Sprint. AT&T has shown a similar difference in upload speeds when tested with the Ookla software in the past.

Sprint is expected to launch its LTE network any day now, and Houston will be one of the first cities to get it.